"And now for something completely different"

The past few blogs made for this class focus on, frankly, the bizarre or certain inversions in each Shakespeare play we have read. The first one discusses the significance of rings and the women they belong to in The Merchant of Venice. The second studies the blunt proposal of the duke and Isabella as well as their brief history together in Measure for Measure. The last describes the corrupt behavior of Prince Harry in I Henry IV. It’s like I don’t want to discuss a normal topic for this assignment. Then again, the unusual usually provokes more discussion, depending on the audience.

In each blog, I have attempted to use the text to prove I’m not picking random for the sake of getting it done. This is more the case in my second one, where I hardly use any source or knowledge outside of Measure for Measure. The first blog sounds like I wanted to write a research paper on the period by alluding to customs I assumed took place around this time and using Merchant of Venice as an example of what would not typically happen. I don’t make much of an attempt to draw connections to other texts until my last one where I try to compare Prince Harry’s plans to that of the duke.

I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing or not that I don’t look for ways to connect different plays to each other. On the one hand, this is one of the goals of the class, so perhaps I should attempt to do so in the future. On the other, each play is different and it may not be essential to weave every Shakespearean play, sonnet, what have you, together in some 16th century crazy quilt. The only thing I will say is, even though I try to have the text support me, I don’t always sound like I fully understand the text. I see this the most in my third blog. When I write, I only comment on what we should have read up to that Monday that we post, meaning what I post could be proven flat out wrong once we finish the play. Hopefully my posts will be more focused and insightful later on as the semester ends.

Regardless of whether any of these are good, it’s nice to have a portion of the class dedicated to picking out what everyone feels is important about the plays we discuss. I do like to highlight the ‘odd man out’ in any literature class I’m in. Authors put in usual characters, traits, etc. in their works for a variety of reasons, so it’s important to gain some understanding of each, even if it turns out to be a trivial reason such as a whim.

A History of Blogs

Blogging for Shakespeare has been a rather unique experience for me, largely because not only is this my first time blogging for a class, but also my first time blogging, ever. For much of my posting, I took my cues from the style of my classmates, investigating what had already been written before sitting down to ponder my own ideas. However, I've found blogging to be surprisingly useful to getting my thoughts focused and in order--I often start out writing with only a few, vague ideas and impressions that I wish to explore further, but by the end of the post, I've managed to explore and define several clear ideas that I wasn't even aware I had formed before writing them.

It seems to me that my topics have, over time, become broader and broader in scope, rather than narrowing as I figure out what precisely interests me in the plays. I began with a critical analysis of Shylock as a deliberately stereotyped and "fool"-figure in The Merchant of Venice, examining the many overly-exaggerated actions and reactions he offered to the audience of the play. While I then concluded that Shylock was meant to be a highly unsympathetic character, having now read the entirety of the play I find I feel differently--the conclusion of the play left me feeling, if not overly sympathetic, than sympathetic enough to make the ensuing defeat of Shylock feel extremely uncomfortable. In my next post, instead of focusing on a single character, I took on the overall idea of morality as represented in Measure for Measure, largely because the sheer diversity of immorality treated within the play fascinated me. I still hold with the conclusions I drew at the end of my post: I think Shakespeare was deliberately trying to present a view of ambiguous morality, challenging the audience to think of what is truly virtuous, or truly villainous, and where the line may be fudged. For my latest post, I decided to tackle the overall differences as I perceived them between history and tragedy plays, something that also fascinated me because, while there are many similarities between the two forms, there were many differences that struck me whilst reading over my (first) history play. It was a doubly interesting topic due to the fact that Shakespeare basically invented the entire genre of history plays all by himself--I wished to delve into why he thought the distinction necessary, rather than simply labeling them "tragedy" or "comedy."

I'm rather fond of my posts, as a whole--they are largely coherent, and stick to a few specific, related ideas instead of rambling all over the place, which is what I felt like I was doing when I was writing them. I feel like I could probably write a much better post now than I could at the beginning of the semester, especially now that I've grown accustomed to blogging in general, and I'm hoping more of my classes may decide to blog (or do "discussion" posts), because it's actually been kind of fun.